VMware joined Accenture’s “cloud first” push with a new business group designed to boost the seemingly endless focus on helping enterprises accelerate their cloud migration strategies. The venture will pile onto Accenture’s recent multi-billion-dollar cloud investment pledge.

The Accenture VMware Business Group taps into a new “multi-year, multi-million-dollar investment” from both entities. That investment will pay for around 2,000 Accenture employees to be trained in VMware’s products and services.

The investment will also be used for joint go-to-market and sales operations that includes VMware training for more Accenture workers and the development of new service offerings that are based on VMware’s technology. One specific offering noted was a pre-engineered vertical platform designed to help telecommunication providers to accelerate the deployment of 5G and edge computing services.

The work will include launching a VMware Cloud Migration Factory to automate the migration of computing workloads to a cloud environment. Enterprises will be provided with access to a “controlled environment and dedicated resources to plan, test, migrate, and modernize applications at scale to their preferred public, private, and/or hybrid cloud — reducing the risk of moving VMware workloads and accelerating time-to-value.”

The new group also builds on the long-standing history between the two firms. Accenture has acted as one of VMware’s global go-to-market partners, while VMware’s offerings have been used in Accenture’s global IT systems.

Accenture last September announced plans to invest $3 billion over a three-year-period into its newly formed Cloud First group. That organization will include 70,000 employees and integrate Accenture’s experience with cloud migration, infrastructure, application services, and ecosystem partners. Those initial partners included Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alibaba Cloud, IBM, and Oracle.

The consultant giant tied the cloud push to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet explained in a statement that the pandemic “has created a new inflection point that requires every company to dramatically accelerate the move to the cloud as a foundation for digital transformation to build the resilience, new experiences and products, trust, speed, and structural cost reduction that the ongoing health, economic, and societal crisis demands. Digital transformation requires cloud at scale, and post-COVID leadership requires that every business become a ‘cloud first’ business.”

Gartner noted in a recent report that it expects global enterprise IT spending on cloud will accelerate due to the pandemic from 9.1% of total spend last year, to 14.2% in 2025.

The VMware addition furthers those efforts. Accenture’s cloud business was placed in the “leaders” quadrant of Gartner’s 2020 ranking of “Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services.” Others in that group include Deloitte, Capgemini, and Wipro.

The deal also comes at a crucial time for VMware. The vendor has become the bedrock virtualization layer for most of the major cloud hyperscalers, but is set for a significant management change.

Long-time CEO Pat Gelsinger is set to leave the company on Feb. 15. Gelsiner, who has been at the helm of VMware for 9 years, will be taking over as CEO of Intel where he had previously served in various management positions for 30 years.

Analysts had noted that the move “isn’t good news” and “a big loss” for VMware. During his tenure, he oversaw more than 30 acquisitions and successfully pushed the company into networking, cloud, security, containers, and 5G. Meanwhile, he nearly tripled revenue to $12 billion.

The departure is also complicated by VMware’s long-simmering possible split from parent company Dell Technologies, which many expect to happen later this year.

“This was shocking,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, in an email to SDxCentral. “I felt that Pat [Gelsinger] was the heir apparent to Michael Dell to run all of Dell Tech when Michael chose to step down. This isn’t good news for VMware, whose executive ranks have already been thinned out.”